The image of the rapper grants the writer a license to ill, even as Shields and co. implicitly deny rap lyricists any originality of their own. But there’s something else behind this sudden glamorizing of what is, essentially, advanced note-taking. That something else, once the pose is stripped away, starts to sound a lot like anxiety. Art may be theft, as Shields likes to quote Picasso, but it doesn’t follow that theft is art. Art is not ex-nihilo, but neither is it all “ready mades.”